Your email has been forwarded to me and I can advise Mr Miller remains in custody pending his court hearing. As you will appreciate, as these matters are currently before the court I cannot supply you with any more information.

Accused murderer seemed like ‘average Aussie bloke’

A stranger who took pity on Scott Allen Miller hours before he allegedly raped and murdered a Chinese woman says he did not appear to be a vagrant as he mingled with a group of revellers at a trendy Melbourne hotel.

The white-collar worker may be one of the last to people to speak to Mr Miller, 42, before it is alleged he chased, sexually assaulted and murdered pastry chef Renea Lau, 32, in Kings Domain on Saturday morning.

He is assisting police with the investigation, but has also chosen to speak out, saying he feared the allegations against Mr Miller could affect the way other homeless people were treated on Melbourne’s streets.

He said he bought Mr Miller a beer after a chance meeting in the city. Mr Miller had begun to chat with patrons at a bar, but after about an hour the conversation took a turn that started to make the man uncomfortable. “He kept milling around, but at that stage I started to be a bit weirded out,” he said.

The office worker, who has requested anonymity due to his profession, said Mr Miller had approached him in Federation Square earlier that morning and asked him about where to get a drink in Melbourne.

“He said he was from WA, sleeping rough on the streets and did I know a good place to go out,” he said.

When Mr Miller struck up a conversation with the man he was articulate and friendly. “He did appear like your average Aussie bloke,” he said.

After telling Mr Miller he was going to the Carlton Club, the man said, Mr Miller had started to walk with him.

“As we were walking there he told me how he was sleeping rough on the street and I felt a bit sorry for him,” he said.

“When he told me he was homeless I thought he was a very highly functioning homeless person, or that he must have just recently become homeless.”

Mr Miller was on Wednesday charged with twice raping and murdering Ms Lau, a talented pastry chef who had been walking to work along St Kilda Road when she was attacked at about 5.30am.

Mr Miller had been ejected from the Carlton Club hotel on Bourke Street about half an hour earlier, police have said.

The man said Mr Miller did not ask anybody for money and mostly bought his own drinks at the bar. “He has been branded homeless but I thought of him more as itinerant,” he said.

“He was friendly in quite a superficial, flakey way but he was able to insert himself into the group and the conversation.”

The man said he left after spending less than an hour at the Carlton Club that morning.

Mr Miller was on Wednesday charged with twice raping and murdering Ms Lau, a beloved and talented pastry chef who had been walking to work along St Kilda Road, one of Melbourne’s busiest streets, when she was fatally attacked at about 5.30am.

Mind you, it’s very easy to say everyone like Monis should be either locked up or monitored. Ask the ABC and the Greens how they’d react to the powers and reach necessary to do so. Indeed, ask a libertarian.

Abbott promises public report on siege

AAP – December 17, 2014, 7:38 am

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has promised to be upfront with Australians about how the security system failed to put Sydney siege gunman Man Haron Monis under surveillance.

“The system did not adequately deal with this individual,” he conceded on Wednesday morning.

“Two very decent people are dead, others are injured, others are traumatised because of a madman who was roaming our streets.”

Monis and two of his hostages died at the end of a 16-hour siege in Sydney’s CBD, in the Lindt cafe before dawn on Tuesday.

Mr Abbott said he intended to publish a report into what happened in the lead-up to Monday’s siege and why Monis was not on any counter-terrorism watchlist.

The investigation will also look at how and where Monis got a gun.

The self-proclaimed cleric was well known to ASIO and federal and NSW police after a string of alleged crimes and sending threats to the families of dead Australian soldiers.

As recently as Sunday he railed against Australian “terrorism” on his website, vowing to fight the “oppression and terrorism of USA and its allies including UK and Australia”.

“We want to know why he wasn’t being monitored given his history of violence, his history of mental instability and his history of infatuation with extremism,” Mr Abbott said.

It was impossible to monitor everyone all the time so security agencies made judgments about who posed the most risk, he said.

The threshold for placing someone on a watchlist was whether they were regarded as being at risk of committing violence against innocent people.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said it was understandable people wanted answers about how the system had failed.

But it was important not to have a blame game and instead allow authorities to get to the bottom of it, he said.

We fully support the releasing hundreds of children from detention from Christmas Island and the granting protection visas to those asylum seekers as it is overdue on humanitarian grounds. The increase of refugee intake is also welcome.

IMMIGRATION department officials have started the process of releasing hundreds of children from detention on Christmas Island.

BUT the fate of babies born to asylum seekers, who may be removed to an offshore processing centre on Nauru, is not so certain. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said department officials began the work of transferring about 470 children from Christmas Island to the mainland in the early hours of Friday morning. Senators sat past midnight to approve an overhaul of the nation’s migration laws, including the return of temporary protection visas.

MPs on Friday morning took little more than 10 minutes to rubber-stamp a suite of amendments the government negotiated with the Senate crossbench.

It was a much-needed win for the government, which had its higher-education reforms knocked back by the Senate earlier in the week.

“This is a win for Australia, what happened in the Senate last night,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said.

In a sometimes heated and emotional debate in the upper house, Labor and the Greens accused the government of using children in detention on Christmas Island and elsewhere as a bargaining chip.

Mr Morrison was unrepentant, saying he would not take moral lectures from Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young on border protection.

“They demonstrated … that they remain the problem and not the solution,” he told reporters.

Mr Morrison singled out Senator Hanson-Young for special mention, accusing her of being “simply grubby” by attacking prominent refugee advocate Paris Aristotle.

“Senator Hanson-Young couldn’t hold a candle to Paris Aristotle and she should apologise for what she said about him last night,” he said.

The senator told parliament that Mr Aristotle had negotiated a “hostage situation hand-in-hand with Scott Morrison”.

The government will now implement a fast-tracking process to clear a backlog of 30,000 asylum claims left over from the previous Labor government.

If their claims are successful they will be offered a three-year temporary protection visa or a five-year safe-haven visa if they agree to move to a regional area for work or study.

None will be offered permanent protection, however their status will be reviewed when their visas expire.

Asylum seekers whose claims are rejected could be forced out of the country without recourse to appeal.

The government, in a concession to the crossbench, agreed to provide work rights to about 25,000 asylum seekers now on bridging visas and living in the community.

That right will operate immediately, Mr Morrison said.

The government also agreed to increase Australia’s humanitarian intake of refugees.

The new laws will not affect a High Court challenge a group of Tamils brought against the government over their detention at sea mid-year.

What happens to an unknown number of babies born to asylum seekers subject to offshore processing won’t be clear until a separate legal challenge is determined.

The decision to support the government’s overhaul was a tough call for crossbench senators, who negotiated improvements but still considered the legislation far from perfect.

Senator Ricky Muir – who was the final undecided vote – described his anguish after speaking over the phone with crying detention centre staff on Christmas Island.

“The crossbench shouldn’t have been put in this position, but we have,” he told parliament.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon also wrestled with the decision but, like Senator Muir, believed the amendments would give hope to thousands of people stuck in detention.

Another independent, Jacqui Lambie – who opposed the legislation – attacked the government for keeping children detained for so long.

“These kids have been sitting there for 15 months, and you want a pat on the back? You’ve got to be kidding yourselves,” she said.